Welcome to Trivia Blaze. This game has a database of over 11,000 questions and answers. The game posts questions at the top of the screen and letter boxes with the answer scrambled. The object is to unscramble the letters to form the correct answer. This is done by dragging and dropping the letters until you have the correct order and a bell rings indicating that you have solved the question. Using your trivia knowledge and puzzle solving skills, you can become a trivia master.
If you enjoy word puzzles, trivia games, and general vocabulary quizzes, then you will definitely benefit from Trivia Blaze. Building your vocabulary and challenging your knowledge is good way to stimulate your intelligence and become better at other games as well.
If you find this game beneficial and fun, then I would invite you to rate and review Trivia Blaze. The more ratings and review the better. This will help others to decide it they want to install Trivia Blaze on their phones or tablets.
One feature of Trivia Blaze is the HINT button. When you press the HINT button the game algorithm chooses a random letter and puts it in place for you as a help in solving the puzzle. If you continually press the HINT button the algorithm will keep placing letters until the entire word is solved. So at any point you may see the answer and drag and drop the remaining letters until the puzzle is solved.
The NEXT button simply advances the game to the next puzzle. If a particular puzzle is too difficult, then you can just press the NEXT button and go to the next question.
Trivia Blaze also has a scoring mechanism that allows you to keep track of your progress. Every time you solve a word, you are awarded one point. However, pressing the hint button for more than half of the letters counts as a wrong answer. By pressing the SCORE button you can view your progress. It tells you how many answers you have correct and the total number of questions asked. Your average percentage is your correct answers divided by the total number of questions asked.
Trivia Blaze also has a unique feature that facilitates learning. Questions are repeated occasionally to help you remember them for future use. This is a carefully chosen algorithm that will help you learn new vocabulary and increase your puzzle solving skills. This algorithm triggers when the HINT button is used. If you use the HINT button one or more times during the solving of a puzzle, then the game has a memory and will give you that same question again at a later point in the game. This mechanism reinforces your memory and helps to learn new words and trivia facts by repetition.
So, now you know how the game works. I hope you learn a lot and enjoy. Thanks for playing Trivia Blaze.
If you enjoy word puzzles, trivia games, and general vocabulary quizzes, then you will definitely benefit from Trivia Blaze. Building your vocabulary and challenging your knowledge is good way to stimulate your intelligence and become better at other games as well.
If you find this game beneficial and fun, then I would invite you to rate and review Trivia Blaze. The more ratings and review the better. This will help others to decide it they want to install Trivia Blaze on their phones or tablets.
One feature of Trivia Blaze is the HINT button. When you press the HINT button the game algorithm chooses a random letter and puts it in place for you as a help in solving the puzzle. If you continually press the HINT button the algorithm will keep placing letters until the entire word is solved. So at any point you may see the answer and drag and drop the remaining letters until the puzzle is solved.
The NEXT button simply advances the game to the next puzzle. If a particular puzzle is too difficult, then you can just press the NEXT button and go to the next question.
Trivia Blaze also has a scoring mechanism that allows you to keep track of your progress. Every time you solve a word, you are awarded one point. However, pressing the hint button for more than half of the letters counts as a wrong answer. By pressing the SCORE button you can view your progress. It tells you how many answers you have correct and the total number of questions asked. Your average percentage is your correct answers divided by the total number of questions asked.
Trivia Blaze also has a unique feature that facilitates learning. Questions are repeated occasionally to help you remember them for future use. This is a carefully chosen algorithm that will help you learn new vocabulary and increase your puzzle solving skills. This algorithm triggers when the HINT button is used. If you use the HINT button one or more times during the solving of a puzzle, then the game has a memory and will give you that same question again at a later point in the game. This mechanism reinforces your memory and helps to learn new words and trivia facts by repetition.
So, now you know how the game works. I hope you learn a lot and enjoy. Thanks for playing Trivia Blaze.
Trivia refers to bits of information, often of little importance. The trivia (singular trivium) are three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education and an important building block for all undergraduates.
The ancient Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road split or forked into two roads. Triviae was formed from tri (three) and viae (roads) – literally meaning "three roads", and in transferred use "a public place" and hence the meaning "commonplace."
The pertaining adjective is triviālis. The adjective trivial was adopted in Early Modern English, while the noun trivium only appears in learned usage from the 19th century, in reference to the Artes Liberales and the plural trivia in the sense of "trivialities, trifles" only in the 20th century.
The Latin adjective triviālis in Classical Latin besides its literal meaning could have the meaning "appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." In late Latin, it could also simply mean "triple." In medieval Latin, it came to refer to the lower division of the Artes Liberales, namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (The other four Liberal Arts were the quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were more challenging.) Hence, trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest only to an undergraduate.
The adjective trivial introduced into English in the 15th to 16th century was influenced by all three meanings of the Latin adjective:
"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along."
Trivialities, bits of information of little consequence was the title of a popular book by British aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), first published in 1902 but popularized in 1918 (with More Trivia following in 1921 and a collected edition including both in 1933). It consisted of short essays often tied to observation of small things and commonplace moments. Trivia is the plural of trivium, "a public place." The adjectival form of this, trivialis, was hence translated by Smith as "commonplace."
In the 1918 version of his book Trivia, Smith wrote:
I KNOW too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as "Trivia" was in a Columbia Daily Spectator column published on February 5, 1965. The authors, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, then started the first organized "trivia contests". Their book Trivia (Dell, 1966) achieved a ranking on the New York Times best seller list; the book was an extension of the pair's Columbia contests and was followed by other Goodgold and Carlinsky trivia titles. In their second book, More Trivial Trivia, the authors criticized practitioners who were "indiscriminate enough to confuse the flower of trivia with the weed of minutiae"; Trivia, they wrote, "is concerned with tugging at heartstrings," while minutiae deals with such unevocative questions as "Which state is the largest consumer of Jell-O?" But over the years the word has come to refer to obscure and arcane bits of dry knowledge as well as nostalgic remembrances of pop culture. The board game Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and was a craze in the U.S. for several years thereafter.
The largest current trivia contest is held in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point's college radio station WWSP 89.9 FM. This is a college station with 11,500 watts of power and about a 65-mile (105-kilometre) radius, and the contest serves as a fund raiser for the station. The contest is open to anyone, and it is played in April of each year spanning 54 hours over a weekend with eight questions each hour. There are usually 400 teams ranging from 1 to 150 players. The top ten teams are awarded trophies. The 46th WWSP contest was held on April 17–19, 2015.
The two longest continuous trivia contests in the world are the Great Midwest Trivia Contest at Lawrence University and the Williams Trivia Contest, which both debuted in the spring of 1966. Lawrence hosts its contest annually. Unusually, Williams has a separate contest for each semester, and thus its 84th game took place in May 2008.
The University of Colorado Trivia Bowl was a mostly student contest featuring a single-elimination tournament based on the GE College Bowl. Many of the best trivia players in America trace participation through this tournament including many Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants. The current event now is a regional qualifier for T.R.A.S.H. (Testing Recall About Strange Happenings) and utilizes a round robin competition format.
Today, many bars and restaurants host weekly trivia nights in an effort to draw in more patrons, especially during weeknights.
Word games (also called word game puzzles) are spoken or board games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.
Word games are generally engaged as a source of entertainment, but have been found to serve an educational purpose as well. For instance, young children can find enjoyment playing modestly competitive games such as Hangman, while naturally developing important language skills like spelling. Solving crossword puzzles, which requires familiarity with a larger vocabulary, is a pastime that mature adults have long credited with keeping their minds sharp.
There are popular televised word games with valuable monetary prizes for the winning contestants. Many word games enjoy international popularity across a multitude of languages, while some are unique to English-speakers.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a gameboard which is divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns. The words must be defined in a standard dictionary, or present in specified reference works (e.g., the Official Tournament and Club Word List, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary), which provide a list of officially permissible words.
The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and has been sold by Hasbro's Parker Brothers division since 1999. Prior to 1999, it was sold as a Milton Bradley game. Outside the United States and Canada, Scrabble is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.
The game is played by two to four players on a square board with a 15×15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack.
The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pink "double-word" squares, of which one, the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol; 12 dark blue "triple-letter" squares, and 24 light blue "double-letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL. Despite this, the original premium square color scheme is still the preferred scheme for Scrabble boards used in tournaments.
The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English-language version. Each tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile—the game's equivalent of a wild card—played as the word's first letter. The blank tile is worth zero points.In an English-language set, the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as vowels are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values.
Tiles are usually made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimetres (0.75 in × 0.75 in) square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board. Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition varies the width up to 2 mm (0.08 in) for different letters. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (e.g. 13 mm × 13 mm (0.51 in × 0.51 in)); sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. The capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner.
S is one of the most valuable tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be appended to many words to pluralize them (or in the case of most verbs, convert them to the third person singular present tense, such as the word LAUGHS); Alfred Butts included only four instances to avoid a game that was "too easy". Q is considered the most problematic letter, as most words with it also contain U; a similar problem occurs in other languages like French, Dutch, Italian and German. J is also difficult to play due to its low frequency and a scarcity of words having it at the end. C and V may be troublesome in the endgame, since no two-letter words with them exist, save for CH in SOWPODS.
Before the game, a resource, either a word list or a dictionary, is selected for the purpose of adjudicating any challenges during the game. The letter tiles are either put in an opaque bag or placed face down on a flat surface. Opaque cloth bags and customized tiles are staples of clubs and tournaments, where games are rarely played without both.
A game of Scrabble in TagalogNext, players decide the order in which they play. The normal approach is for players to each draw one tile: The player who picks the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first, with the blank tiles taking precedence over A's. In North American tournaments, the rules of the US-based North American Scrabble Players Association(NASPA) stipulate instead that players who have gone first in the fewest number of previous games in the tournament go first, and when that rule yields a tie, those who have gone second the most go first. If there is still a tie, tiles are drawn as in the standard rules.
At the beginning of the game, each player draws seven tiles from the bag and places them on his or her rack, concealed from the other player(s).
On each turn, the player has three options:
A blank tile may represent any letter, and scores zero points, regardless of its placement or what letter it represents. But its placement on a double-word or triple-word square does cause the corresponding premium to be applied to the word(s) in which it is used. Once a blank tile is placed, it remains that letter for the rest of the game.
After making a play, the player announces the score for that play, then if the game is being played with a clock, starts his or her opponent's clock. The player can change his play anytime his or her clock is running, but commits to the play when he or she starts the opponent's clock. The player then draws tiles from the bag to replenish his or her rack to seven tiles. If there are not enough tiles in the bag to do so, the player takes all the remaining tiles.
If a player has made a play and has not yet drawn a tile, the opponent may choose to challenge any or all words formed by the play. The player challenged must then look up the words in question using a specified word source (such as OTCWL, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, or CSW) and if any one of them is found to be unacceptable, the play is removed from the board, the player returns the newly played tiles to his or her rack and the turn is forfeited. In tournament play, a challenge may be to the entire play or any one or more words, and judges (human or computer) are used, so players are not entitled to know which word(s) are invalid. Penalties for unsuccessfully challenging an acceptable play vary in club and tournament play, and are described in greater detail below.
Under North American tournament rules, the game ends when either (1) one player plays every tile on his or her rack, and there are no tiles remaining in the bag (regardless of the tiles on his or her opponent's rack); (2) at least six successive scoreless turns have occurred and either player decides to end the game; or (3) either player uses more than 10 minutes of overtime. (For several years, a game could not end with a cumulative score of 0-0, but that is no longer the case, and such games have since occurred a number of times in tournament play, the winner being the player with the lower total point value on his or her rack.)
When the game ends, each player's score is reduced by the sum of his or her unplayed letters. In addition, if a player has used all of his or her letters (known as "going out" or "playing out"), the sum of the other player's unplayed letters is added to that player's score; in tournament play, a player who goes out adds twice that sum, and his or her opponent is not penalized.
Scoreless turns can occur when a player passes, when a player exchanges tiles, or when a player loses a challenge. The latter rule varies slightly in international tournaments. A scoreless turn can also theoretically occur if a play consists of only blank tiles, but this is extremely unlikely in actual play.
The ancient Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road split or forked into two roads. Triviae was formed from tri (three) and viae (roads) – literally meaning "three roads", and in transferred use "a public place" and hence the meaning "commonplace."
The pertaining adjective is triviālis. The adjective trivial was adopted in Early Modern English, while the noun trivium only appears in learned usage from the 19th century, in reference to the Artes Liberales and the plural trivia in the sense of "trivialities, trifles" only in the 20th century.
The Latin adjective triviālis in Classical Latin besides its literal meaning could have the meaning "appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar." In late Latin, it could also simply mean "triple." In medieval Latin, it came to refer to the lower division of the Artes Liberales, namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (The other four Liberal Arts were the quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were more challenging.) Hence, trivial in this sense would have meant "of interest only to an undergraduate.
The adjective trivial introduced into English in the 15th to 16th century was influenced by all three meanings of the Latin adjective:
- A 15th century English translation of Ranulf Higden mentions the arte trivialle, referring to the trivium of the Liberal Arts.
- the same work also calls a triuialle distinccion a threefold division. This is due to an application of the term by Arnobius, and was never common either in Latin or English.
- the meaning "trite, commonplace, unimportant, slight" occurs from the late 16th century, notably in the works of Shakespeare.
"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets conduct thy bard along."
Trivialities, bits of information of little consequence was the title of a popular book by British aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), first published in 1902 but popularized in 1918 (with More Trivia following in 1921 and a collected edition including both in 1933). It consisted of short essays often tied to observation of small things and commonplace moments. Trivia is the plural of trivium, "a public place." The adjectival form of this, trivialis, was hence translated by Smith as "commonplace."
In the 1918 version of his book Trivia, Smith wrote:
I KNOW too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as "Trivia" was in a Columbia Daily Spectator column published on February 5, 1965. The authors, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, then started the first organized "trivia contests". Their book Trivia (Dell, 1966) achieved a ranking on the New York Times best seller list; the book was an extension of the pair's Columbia contests and was followed by other Goodgold and Carlinsky trivia titles. In their second book, More Trivial Trivia, the authors criticized practitioners who were "indiscriminate enough to confuse the flower of trivia with the weed of minutiae"; Trivia, they wrote, "is concerned with tugging at heartstrings," while minutiae deals with such unevocative questions as "Which state is the largest consumer of Jell-O?" But over the years the word has come to refer to obscure and arcane bits of dry knowledge as well as nostalgic remembrances of pop culture. The board game Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and was a craze in the U.S. for several years thereafter.
The largest current trivia contest is held in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point's college radio station WWSP 89.9 FM. This is a college station with 11,500 watts of power and about a 65-mile (105-kilometre) radius, and the contest serves as a fund raiser for the station. The contest is open to anyone, and it is played in April of each year spanning 54 hours over a weekend with eight questions each hour. There are usually 400 teams ranging from 1 to 150 players. The top ten teams are awarded trophies. The 46th WWSP contest was held on April 17–19, 2015.
The two longest continuous trivia contests in the world are the Great Midwest Trivia Contest at Lawrence University and the Williams Trivia Contest, which both debuted in the spring of 1966. Lawrence hosts its contest annually. Unusually, Williams has a separate contest for each semester, and thus its 84th game took place in May 2008.
The University of Colorado Trivia Bowl was a mostly student contest featuring a single-elimination tournament based on the GE College Bowl. Many of the best trivia players in America trace participation through this tournament including many Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants. The current event now is a regional qualifier for T.R.A.S.H. (Testing Recall About Strange Happenings) and utilizes a round robin competition format.
Today, many bars and restaurants host weekly trivia nights in an effort to draw in more patrons, especially during weeknights.
Word games (also called word game puzzles) are spoken or board games often designed to test ability with language or to explore its properties.
Word games are generally engaged as a source of entertainment, but have been found to serve an educational purpose as well. For instance, young children can find enjoyment playing modestly competitive games such as Hangman, while naturally developing important language skills like spelling. Solving crossword puzzles, which requires familiarity with a larger vocabulary, is a pastime that mature adults have long credited with keeping their minds sharp.
There are popular televised word games with valuable monetary prizes for the winning contestants. Many word games enjoy international popularity across a multitude of languages, while some are unique to English-speakers.
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a gameboard which is divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns. The words must be defined in a standard dictionary, or present in specified reference works (e.g., the Official Tournament and Club Word List, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary), which provide a list of officially permissible words.
The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and has been sold by Hasbro's Parker Brothers division since 1999. Prior to 1999, it was sold as a Milton Bradley game. Outside the United States and Canada, Scrabble is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.
The game is played by two to four players on a square board with a 15×15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack.
The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pink "double-word" squares, of which one, the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol; 12 dark blue "triple-letter" squares, and 24 light blue "double-letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL. Despite this, the original premium square color scheme is still the preferred scheme for Scrabble boards used in tournaments.
The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English-language version. Each tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile—the game's equivalent of a wild card—played as the word's first letter. The blank tile is worth zero points.In an English-language set, the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as vowels are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values.
Tiles are usually made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimetres (0.75 in × 0.75 in) square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board. Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition varies the width up to 2 mm (0.08 in) for different letters. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (e.g. 13 mm × 13 mm (0.51 in × 0.51 in)); sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. The capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner.
S is one of the most valuable tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be appended to many words to pluralize them (or in the case of most verbs, convert them to the third person singular present tense, such as the word LAUGHS); Alfred Butts included only four instances to avoid a game that was "too easy". Q is considered the most problematic letter, as most words with it also contain U; a similar problem occurs in other languages like French, Dutch, Italian and German. J is also difficult to play due to its low frequency and a scarcity of words having it at the end. C and V may be troublesome in the endgame, since no two-letter words with them exist, save for CH in SOWPODS.
Before the game, a resource, either a word list or a dictionary, is selected for the purpose of adjudicating any challenges during the game. The letter tiles are either put in an opaque bag or placed face down on a flat surface. Opaque cloth bags and customized tiles are staples of clubs and tournaments, where games are rarely played without both.
A game of Scrabble in TagalogNext, players decide the order in which they play. The normal approach is for players to each draw one tile: The player who picks the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first, with the blank tiles taking precedence over A's. In North American tournaments, the rules of the US-based North American Scrabble Players Association(NASPA) stipulate instead that players who have gone first in the fewest number of previous games in the tournament go first, and when that rule yields a tie, those who have gone second the most go first. If there is still a tie, tiles are drawn as in the standard rules.
At the beginning of the game, each player draws seven tiles from the bag and places them on his or her rack, concealed from the other player(s).
On each turn, the player has three options:
- Pass, forfeiting the turn and scoring nothing
- Exchange one or more tiles for an equal number from the bag, scoring nothing, an option available only if at least seven tiles remain in the bag
- Play at least one tile on the board, adding the value of all words formed to the player's cumulative score
A blank tile may represent any letter, and scores zero points, regardless of its placement or what letter it represents. But its placement on a double-word or triple-word square does cause the corresponding premium to be applied to the word(s) in which it is used. Once a blank tile is placed, it remains that letter for the rest of the game.
After making a play, the player announces the score for that play, then if the game is being played with a clock, starts his or her opponent's clock. The player can change his play anytime his or her clock is running, but commits to the play when he or she starts the opponent's clock. The player then draws tiles from the bag to replenish his or her rack to seven tiles. If there are not enough tiles in the bag to do so, the player takes all the remaining tiles.
If a player has made a play and has not yet drawn a tile, the opponent may choose to challenge any or all words formed by the play. The player challenged must then look up the words in question using a specified word source (such as OTCWL, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, or CSW) and if any one of them is found to be unacceptable, the play is removed from the board, the player returns the newly played tiles to his or her rack and the turn is forfeited. In tournament play, a challenge may be to the entire play or any one or more words, and judges (human or computer) are used, so players are not entitled to know which word(s) are invalid. Penalties for unsuccessfully challenging an acceptable play vary in club and tournament play, and are described in greater detail below.
Under North American tournament rules, the game ends when either (1) one player plays every tile on his or her rack, and there are no tiles remaining in the bag (regardless of the tiles on his or her opponent's rack); (2) at least six successive scoreless turns have occurred and either player decides to end the game; or (3) either player uses more than 10 minutes of overtime. (For several years, a game could not end with a cumulative score of 0-0, but that is no longer the case, and such games have since occurred a number of times in tournament play, the winner being the player with the lower total point value on his or her rack.)
When the game ends, each player's score is reduced by the sum of his or her unplayed letters. In addition, if a player has used all of his or her letters (known as "going out" or "playing out"), the sum of the other player's unplayed letters is added to that player's score; in tournament play, a player who goes out adds twice that sum, and his or her opponent is not penalized.
Scoreless turns can occur when a player passes, when a player exchanges tiles, or when a player loses a challenge. The latter rule varies slightly in international tournaments. A scoreless turn can also theoretically occur if a play consists of only blank tiles, but this is extremely unlikely in actual play.